Christian Eriksen does not believe the atmosphere played a part in Manchester United’s thrashing against Sevilla on Thursday night. After throwing the game away in the closing stages of the first leg at Old Trafford, Erik ten Hag wanted his players to respond at the Ramon Sanchez-Pizjuan Stadium, but they immediately looked unnerved by the hostile atmosphere. Sevilla needed just seven minutes to score after an amateurish mix-up between David de Gea and Harry Maguire and the hosts almost scored again in the 41st minute when VAR ruled out Lucas Ocampos’ goal due to offside. In the build-up to the third goal, De Gea attempted to clear the ball outside of his box before miskicking it and leaving an empty goal behind him to be taken advantage of, which a grateful Youssef En-Nesyri duly slotted into. It was a disastrous night for United and Eriksen, speaking to BT Sport, reflected on the performance after the crushing defeat.
Christian Eriksen said: “A lot of things happened. We didn’t really get in the game from the first minute. I think we tried, but today, we gave them a lot of opportunities to finish us off. I think we lost a bit of coolness in the build-up. They were high pressure and we didn’t deal well with that. I think we made more mistakes than we normally do and personally or not, I think the whole team today, we couldn’t catch up on the mistakes the team made. No I don’t think it’s anything with that [atmosphere], take away where we play, if we give away goals as we did today, we’ll lose. It’s nothing to do with the atmosphere, I just think our own game was not strong enough. I don’t know why that was. It’s football, sometimes you have good days, sometimes you have bad days and today was one of those. We tried to do everything we could to avoid it, but we couldn’t and we have a game in four days for revenge.”
